


Poison

by AdAbolendam



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Maybe a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel, Tension, Tragedy, Uncontrolled Anger, impending character death, spoilers for 5x10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 12:31:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13590120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AdAbolendam/pseuds/AdAbolendam
Summary: It was only a matter of time before May figured out the truth.





	Poison

“Did you think I wouldn’t notice?”  
  
The pause he took when the meaning of her words hit him was so brief, it would have been imperceptible to anyone else. Except for her.  
  
She saw everything.  
  
The clip of the pistol fell into his waiting palm. Frowning, Phil Coulson examined its contents before sliding the magazine back into place making a comforting click in his hand.  
  
When he finally looked up to meet her accusing glare, he kept his face studiously blank. Even now, he wondered why he bothered.  
  
She already knew.  
  
“Notice what?” He answered.  
  
Melinda May pushed off the doorframe of the weapons’ cage with a nudge of her hip and stood three feet from him.  
  
“Are we really going to do this?” She asked.  
  
He understood what she was asking. The persistent nagging of his conscience told him to spare her the denials. It demanded that he come clean.  
  
But then, it would tell him that. That still, small voice in his head was hers.  
  
He did not want to say it.  
  
Their friendship, their history, everything that they had, would change when he admitted the truth. He wanted to hold on to it just the way it was.  
  
For just a few seconds more.  
  
“I guess we are,” he said softly.  
  
Her eyes narrowed, but they never left his own. He could feel her focus boring into him, reading the rapidly-sparking synapses of his brain.  
  
“Risking your relationship with Daisy to bring her back with us was a reckless move, but I understood it,” May began. “I would have ICED her myself if you hadn’t. But you said you needed her to lead. Why?”  
  
A lift of his eyebrows was the only change in his otherwise placid expression.  
  
“I can’t lead SHIELD forever,” he answered matter-of-factly.  
  
“You’ve said it twice more since we’ve gotten back.”  
  
“Daisy has natural instincts,” Coulson reasoned. “She knows what needs to be done and she has the respect of her teammates to see that the job is followed through. She’s resilient. We’ve seen her—  
  
“I’m not questioning her competency,” May said, stopping him. “I’m asking,‘why now?’”  
  
Coulson grimaced and concentrated on replacing the gun in his side-holster.  
  
He could hear the barely-concealed exasperation in her sharp exhale when he looked away.  
  
“You caught a bullet in the firefight earlier,” she stated. “You didn’t go to medical. Why?”  
  
“It was just a graze,” he demurred.  
  
“You didn’t even flinch, Phil,” she said. “I saw you.”  
  
Of course she did.  
  
No one else on the team saw anything except for a hail of gunfire, their senses having been dulled by the white haze of adrenaline. But she saw through the fog. Just like she was trained to do.  
  
It was her sharp senses that had kept the two of them alive for going on thirty years.  
  
Those same skills would deprive them of whatever precious time they had left.  
  
“You didn’t feel it, did you?” May asked.  
  
Her posture and glare still radiated accusation, but he could feel the uncertainty behind the façade. Decades of experience had taught him a dozen of her microscopic tells, none of which he could articulate. His senses read her faster than his rational brain could process, knowing the truth of her intentions in a way that could only be described as instinct.  
  
She wanted him to tell her she was wrong.  
  
The now-familiar bubble of irrational anger rose in his chest.  
  
It was strange.  
  
He could no longer feel pain anywhere above his torso, but he felt this. It was always there now, simmering below the surface: searing anger that threated to culminate in an explosion of rage.  
  
Why did she ask him questions that she did not want to know the answers to? Why was she trying to steal the only stability in his life he had left? Why was she going to make him hurt her again?  
  
Something in his expression must have given him away.  
  
She blinked and took a cautious step back.  
  
Her uncertainty was so genuinely out-of-character that the fire in his chest evaporated as quickly as it had come.  
  
“No,” he admitted. “I didn’t feel it.”  
  
There was nothing left to do but to show her what he had been hiding for the five days since they had returned to their own time.  
  
Coulson’s neck and face grew warm as she watched him unfasten the buttons on his shirt, revealing the network of dark tendrils that had spiderwebbed from his heart until they covered his chest and upper arms. He forced himself to watch her eyes widen in horror. He stayed motionless as she probed the extent of the poison’s reach with her hands. The pads of her fingers were warm against his skin.  
  
At least he could still feel that.  
  
“What--?”  
  
She pulled her hand back and he stole the opportunity, concealing the malignant pattern again with his shirt.  
  
When he raised his head again, he saw it.  
  
Everything he did not want to see when he looked at her.  
  
Terror. Revulsion. Confusion.  
  
“It happened at the Lighthouse,” he said bluntly. “I was cut in a fight. The guy who attacked me was… infected with something. Daisy said it was like PCP. But it’s more than that. It doesn’t just make me angry, or strong, or numb to pain. My heart feels like…”  
  
He stopped himself.  
  
There was no reason she had to hear that.  
  
“It’s killing me, May.”  
  
Her mouth tried to form words, but nothing came out.  
  
“It won’t be much longer,” he finished.  
  
May shook her head, breaking through the shock that had rendered her speechless.  
  
“Have you told FitzSimmons?” She asked. “There’s got to be something that—  
  
“No, and I’m not going to.”  
  
“Why not?” She demanded. “Why aren’t you trying to get better?”  
  
“Because there’s nothing that can be done.”  
  
“You don’t know that!”  
  
“I do know that!” He insisted. “I can’t tell you how, but I know that this is it. I’ve known it since the Lighthouse. I can feel it, May. And I’m not wasting what little time I have left being locked in a lab while everyone scrambles to find a non-existent cure!”  
  
She could not have looked more stricken if he had punched her in the chest.  
  
“Please,” he breathed. “Try to understand…”  
  
May rounded on him, anger cutting through the pain in her eyes.  
  
“Were you going to tell me?”  
  
He managed to hold her gaze, meeting indignation with defiance.  
  
“No.”  
  
“Why—  
  
“Because I didn’t want this!” He exploded, flailing a hand at her.  
  
Goddamnit! He wanted to shake her, hit her, hold her head between his hands until he felt her skull crack.  
  
“Don’t you get it?” He shouted. “I didn’t want to do this to you! To us!”  
  
“Ever since you joined this team, I have tried to give you something, anything that would bring you back from that hell you have been living in since Bahrain! All the time we were partners you had my back, you made me happy! Damnit…you…”  
  
He broke off with a bark of dry laughter.  
  
“If I didn’t have you or the job, I wouldn’t have had a reason to get out of bed most days. You are everything to me! You mean everything!”  
  
Some part of his brain was aware that May was staring at him in disbelief, but all he could see was red. He was going to _make_ her understand. They would not leave this cage until she did.  
  
“And all I wanted was to give you what you gave me: something that would make life worth living for again. But in the past year, you’ve been kidnapped, psychologically tortured, impaled, and left on the surface of a barren rock for dead. Oh, and you _actually_ died.”  
  
“Just for a few minutes,” she murmured.  
  
His answering laugh was hollow.  
  
“I did not want my last days with you to be like this!” He yelled. “I know what this is going to cost you. I didn’t want to cause you any more pain!”  
  
“Phil…”  
  
“What?” He snapped.  
  
“Your hand.”  
  
She gestured to his right side, to where his hand was balled up in a fist. Some time during his tirade, he had clenched the corner of the table so tightly that a piece of wood had broken off in his hand. The shards fell to the floor as he flexed his palm. He watched with detached bewilderment as blood pooled and streamed from a dozen tiny cuts.  
  
“I didn’t even feel it,” he muttered.  
  
What little was left of the colour in her cheeks dissipated at the confession. With a clinched jaw and careful movements, she reached out and took his bloody hand in her own.  
  
Coulson leaned against the table as she picked out the splinters in his palm and fingers, feeling nothing but the warmth of her breath against his wrist. His pulse slowed to something approaching normal and the heat in his chest was starting to abate. He knew the relief was only temporary.  
  
How much longer would it be before he completely lost control?  
  
“You’re lying, you know,” May said, concluding her ministrations by bandaging his hand in a soft cloth.  
  
Now that the bulk of his energy was exhausted, all he could do was look up at her blankly.  
  
“Not telling me isn’t going to spare me any pain,” she explained, leaning back. “It just spares you having to deal with it.”  
  
Coulson closed his eyes.  
  
“I know,” he whispered. “I just didn’t want anything to change until it had to. When you tell someone you’re dying, every conversation after that becomes about that one thing. You know that. We’ve done it before.”  
  
“It was selfish,” he added.  
  
May nodded and pressed her lips together.  
  
“I don’t have anyone else like you. To still be here together after what we have seen and been through… I don’t think there is anyone else like us.”  
  
“There’s not,” May stated firmly.  
  
Coulson gave her a shade of a smile.  
  
“I didn’t want to ruin that before I had to,” he concluded.  
  
She smoothed the cloth on his knuckles unnecessarily, checking her handiwork, refusing to meet his eyes.  
  
Coulson laced his bandaged fingers through hers, prompting her to look up.  
  
“The—there isn’t anyone else like us,” she said huskily. “And after you go, it’s just me. I’ll be alone.”  
  
He took her hand and pulled her in close to him, wrapping his arms around her. Warm tears soaked through his shirt and her shoulders shook beneath him in silent sobs.  
  
His heart, damaged and scarred as it was, was still capable of aching for her.  
  
He had dreaded this conversation for days, anticipating her every reaction, praying he could just hold out long enough so that he would never had to tell her. But now that it was over, he felt lighter and more weighed down all at once. The secret locked in his chest was burning a hole in him quicker than the poison. It had not gone away, but it was not his to suffer alone.  
  
She would carry it with him, like she always did, and it would steal a part of her with it.  
  
May was wrong. He was not lying.  
  
Not entirely.  
  
“I really didn’t want this for you, Melinda,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”  
  
“Please,” she muttered into his chest.  
  
When she looked up at him, he saw a reflection of the woman who had lost herself in that building in Manama, over a decade earlier. She was falling back into that dark place again, but there would be no one to pull her out this time.  
  
“Please try, Phil,” she asked. “Please don’t give up. You’re everything to me, too.”  
  
He pulled her tight against him without a word of reply, knowing it was only a matter of time before he would agree.


End file.
